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With Facebook’s recent S-1 filing as part of their IPO process we are now starting to get a clearer picture of the historic proportions of the company and where it stands in comparison to others who have come before it. Facebook has emerged as a goliath in a sector that just a few years ago was a mere novelty targeted solely at college students. A hit movie and close to a billion users later, Facebook now counts itself as one of the most powerful companies in a rapidly changing business landscape. A landscape that is being powered by those who can best aggregate, analyze and adapt a realtime stream of data. A question still remains, will the Facebook business model be one that allows it to stand the test of time or will the harsh realities of being a public corporation destroy it? In 100 years will Facebook be the General Electric of the cloud or a flash in the proverbial pan?

In a story for the Wall Street Journal, author Doug Laney, Research Vice President at Gartner puts things into perspective by applying what he describes as “emerging techniques that map these information-related volumetrics to Facebook’s actual financials and anticipated market valuation. The results show that you are worth about $81 to Facebook. Your friendships are worth $0.62 each, and your profile page could be valued at $1,800. The value of a business page is worth approximately $3.1 million.”

Essentially Laney describes the value of you and Facebook’s nearly one billion users as being part of the largest unpaid workforce in history. This is a striking way to look at the service. To put it another way, Facebook is essentially mining the human cloud like no other company has ever done. Yes, even Google. Unlike Google, Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself. They not only understand the way you communicate, but have a clear view of your entire social graph over an extended period of your life, possibly for some born today, your entire life. They have been able to cater to a variety of social profiles from the lurker to the information aggregator / influencer to everything and everyone in between. They have mapped the continually evolving DNA of modern society.

This DNA is almost completely about one thing, our personal data, which we are happy to provide in return for use of the social network. Facebook now has 845 million monthly active Users who “Like” or comment 2.7 billion times per day. According to Laney, "based on Facebook’s recent trajectory, this extrapolates to 2.11 trillion pieces of monetizable content collected during the past three years. Its 845 million users, each with an average of 130 friends, equates to 109 billion friendships. Facebook’s S-1 corroborates this figure as “over 100 billion friend connections.”

There has never been any single company or organization, with exception of possibly the US or Chinese government, who have been able to map the relationships of people around the globe to the extent Facebook has been able to do. To understand this you really need to think what the PC era has done to information. In effect what the PC revolution started is what the Cloud era has super charged - Information Creation. Think about it, more personal information is created in the blink of an eye than in a previous life time. And we’re happy to just give it away.

Facebook has created the largest social analytics engine on the planet. They essentially know what we're thinking before we do. Using this raw data they can effectively predict trends and more importantly capitalize on these trends with the greatest of ease. Imagine applying the type of social data to stock market trends or seasonal buying habits, or a multitude of other market trends to predict potential outcomes. Now imagine being able to buy this information as an on demand service. Facebook is now both the producer, broker and distributor of the one of the most important sources of information. The bigger question yet to be answered is whether Facebook will be the Enron of the information age - a one time high flyer who burns out its own weight, built upon an over-hyped cloud. Or will it grow to become the General Electric of our digital lives - a refiner of the most important of data into usable and actionable information. I suppose only time will tell. I'm leaning toward the latter.